Miguel began writing songs at 16, already a confident guitar player in his teenage band Ruprecht, he had a decent musical understanding but the mystery of songwriting seemed an entirely different world which, had all of a sudden opened up to him. Already strongly interested in poetry and literary classics Miguel continued writing songs but his main focus remained in emulating and learning from the guitar greats, John Fahey, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Skip James, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, and the writing styles of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash.

At a younger age still Miguel started playing around in the home built recording studio on the rural alternative community he was raised in far northern Queensland, getting interested in the recording process as well as the world of filmmaking and experimenting with both. He remembers his first 'big' studio experience around 19.

'A place had opened up in Cairns, a professional studio, before that if you wanted to record properly you needed to go to Townsville or Brisbane. I remember thinking that having a studio in Cairns would change everything for me, the circus had come to town. Opportunities had opened up. I moved away a year later, played around the traps in Brisbane, long before acoustic music was cool, grunge was god at the time but I had started to move away from playing electric guitar songs, we would be playing this peace utopian stuff that no one really cared for much at the time. Broke, living in Brisbane, recording songs onto a tape deck through the onboard mic, even having bootlegs of the material sold at local universities, there was an appetite for lyrically driven songs. Miguels focus had always been to move to Melbourne to further pursue a life in music. He made the move with his band in '99, which lasted a few years of solid gigging and some recording before breaking up. Miguel played around Melbourne with other bands such as The Black Hills and Foxes Wedding as well as continuing to write and home record his songs, performing them mostly with long time collaborator Ash Jones on fiddle.